Rainbow Flakes

Abstract

Had Browning contrived to set the seal on his allegiance to Shelley by dying at the same age, it is hard to know what we would have made of him. He would have been the author of Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello, of that thick sheaf of pages that even now unnerves the student setting out on a serious study of Browning. He would have been one of those poets who attract a small coterie of admirers, and every now and then their missionary zeal would have forced him for a time on the attention of a wider audience. He would have ranked, I suppose, just above Beddoes and just below Clough. Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello are all of them, in some sense, failures, but they are failures more substantial than many successes, for they are that peculiar kind of poetic failure that will not go away.